#i know you're supposed to introduce your novel with an elevator pitch and not 600+ words of exposition

[apigeonisapigeon]

Arson and Other Fires: Worldbuilding I

At some unspecified point in the future, humanity has expanded into the stars. While the rich and powerful set up in atmosphere-controlled space stations and the handful of planets that can be terraformed, a series of genetic experiments creates a "second generation" of humans capable of withstanding harsher environments, who are sent to remote planets to work as miners, as factory workers, as farmers, as soldiers. The subsequent generations — who inherit these traits and are raised without much by way of education or social support — largely carry on in the same types of jobs. (Some skeevy rich people also use it to create bespoke kids for themselves but this isn't about them. mostly.) 

Because humanity as a rule cannot resist the urge to tinker, there are experiments and medical trials, and after a few decades, one group of scientists comes forward with a proposal: they can, they believe, induce a range of psychic abilities in their subjects. One of the larger governments (who I'll call G1 here because they have a provisional name in the WIP) gives them a grant out of their military budget, five years to produce results, and sends them on their way. The first set of subjects are soldiers who "volunteered" to participate, and it goes... badly. There's fatalities, there's lifelong health complications, there's a flagrant disregard for ethics and also the scientific method. They manage to bluff their way through the annual reports, but the full review at the end of the five years sees the whole thing shut down. There's threats of legal action, bribery to avoid the legal action, a good number of the scientists are strongly encouraged to take an early retirement.

So there's just this group of bitter, unemployed, highly-trained scientists and their traumatized ex-research subjects in this little Manhattan Project-style city of a space station built specifically for the project — a handful of both the scientists and the test subjects leave, along with most of the support workers (janitors, cooks, ect.) but most don't really have anywhere else to go. So they stay as this terrible little dysfunctional community, and after a while, some of the former test subjects start to have kids, and like the Second Gen before them, the Third Gen kids inherit their parents' traits, but they're not quite as unstable. Within a few years, the remaining scientists have the whole Third Gen thing more or less figured out and manage to wrangle themselves some shiny new private funding from the peripheral rich people mentioned above.

But the majority of Third Gen kids aren't going to live with the peripheral rich people; they're born into the community and reach adulthood with a sketchy education and the fact that they're the products of illegal genetic experimentation severely hampering their career prospects. While they're not (initially) raising the kids to be soldiers, it pretty quickly becomes a small town where joining the military is just the thing one does at the age of 16–18 — except they can't join the actual military on account of the whole illegal experimentation thing, so instead they become mercenaries, and the mercenary outfits in turn start funding the scientific study-turned vaguely cultish town, and suddenly it *is* a place that's raising kids to be soldiers. 

In the midst of all this, with their mercenary funding in hand, the project starts to expand and eventually establishes a secondary site called the Outer Station, but the problem with growing numbers is that they're hard to hide. There's people who leave, there's all the vendors needed to support any population centre, and of course the other mercenaries talk. At some point, someone in G1 starts to get suspicious. There's an official study commissioned, and it's determined that the number of documented Third Gen they have wandering around — which they know likely isn't anywhere near the total — cannot mathematically have come from the original batch of survivors organically having kids. There's an inquest, and then a stealth operation. Those who aren't taken into custody scatter, and after five years of searching, the former director is finally arrested. This is where our story starts.